Excellent board for budget overclocker
Pros: 125w cpu support, HDMI, 4 RAM slot, 6 SATA, Solid caps
Cons: no SATA 6Gbps or USB3 support, no pci 1x. Bios support not that great
I've this board for about 10 month now. While making my purchase decision, only thing i was considering was cheap board with atleast 125w cpu support along with DDR3 and HDMI. This board suite me perfectly not only because i don't really need USB3 and SATA3 anyway at the moment for within a year time at same time it had what i could use in near future like 6 sata port( i have multi HDD drives) DVI, HDMI, 4 ram slot.
Most importantly, i'm not sure if some of you know this, but Its T series board which is very good for overclocking compare to "normal" A series board(example A880g) from biostar. Not only it has decent power circuit for CPU but very extensive configurable bios one of the best bios I've seen mostly because i like terminology used my biostar for configuration options, its clean and clear menu organisation.
So, Moving on, since it mATX board don't expect much. Overclocking cpu was good, i was able to reach my 550/B50 core limit at 3.8Ghz(C2 rev). Memory performance(RAM) seems to be too weak compare to older TA790GXE DDR2 board(with kingston HyperX)
But major problem i faced was proper bios support for unlocking core. At first when i setup, i set all advance bios and OC option i usually set but windows fail to boot. I had trouble to single out the problem but after lots of trail and error i found these issues with the board.
With C1E enable and ACC core unlocking enable windows fail to boot, No issue with POST.
Also, Memory channel will only work if channel is set as "Unganged mode". With gange mode it gives memory error. as much as i can understand its diffidently memory mapping issue sometime windows boot but get lots of memory error, sometime boot time BSOD.
Worst thing though, is Bios updates and customer support. Sure i got the reply soon enough but the problem persist with no fix in near or long term atleast no official mention of such. With 3 years experience with Biostar T series board the bios updates are not as frequent as ASUS but most importantly the issue remains.
Which is why i had to set memory to "ungange mode" which reduces bandwidth and memory performance. Certainly i'm not happy with situation because my previous DDR2 board TA790GXE with kingston HyperX1066 yielded better results than corsair Vengeance at 1600.
Other than that board seem perfect to me, obviously some may be missing but then again i knew what i was getting( feature wise).
Most importantly, i'm not sure if some of you know this, but Its T series board which is very good for overclocking compare to "normal" A series board(example A880g) from biostar. Not only it has decent power circuit for CPU but very extensive configurable bios one of the best bios I've seen mostly because i like terminology used my biostar for configuration options, its clean and clear menu organisation.
So, Moving on, since it mATX board don't expect much. Overclocking cpu was good, i was able to reach my 550/B50 core limit at 3.8Ghz(C2 rev). Memory performance(RAM) seems to be too weak compare to older TA790GXE DDR2 board(with kingston HyperX)
But major problem i faced was proper bios support for unlocking core. At first when i setup, i set all advance bios and OC option i usually set but windows fail to boot. I had trouble to single out the problem but after lots of trail and error i found these issues with the board.
With C1E enable and ACC core unlocking enable windows fail to boot, No issue with POST.
Also, Memory channel will only work if channel is set as "Unganged mode". With gange mode it gives memory error. as much as i can understand its diffidently memory mapping issue sometime windows boot but get lots of memory error, sometime boot time BSOD.
Worst thing though, is Bios updates and customer support. Sure i got the reply soon enough but the problem persist with no fix in near or long term atleast no official mention of such. With 3 years experience with Biostar T series board the bios updates are not as frequent as ASUS but most importantly the issue remains.
Which is why i had to set memory to "ungange mode" which reduces bandwidth and memory performance. Certainly i'm not happy with situation because my previous DDR2 board TA790GXE with kingston HyperX1066 yielded better results than corsair Vengeance at 1600.
Other than that board seem perfect to me, obviously some may be missing but then again i knew what i was getting( feature wise).
